Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

When we were eight years old, we joined hands in a circle and promised to be true to each other and to do good in the world at large. Kid stuff, you might say, and maybe it was. But it was also a vow worth making and a pledge worth keeping. Tomorrow I will try to hold you to it.

Tonight I am putting a few things in writing because, for all my careful planning, I can’t be sure you won’t find a way around taking responsibility for your own actions, for continuing to deny the enormity of what you’ve done. You’ve always been very good, in your sweet way, at not doing what you don’t want to do. How do you do it, Kat? How do you stop talking to your oldest friend and persuade the school that I’m the one who turned my back on you? All these months, I could have gone to Josie, told her what was going on, but I didn’t want to put her in the middle. I didn’t want to be the one to break the news to her that even Kat Hartigan isn’t perfect. Is, in fact, a killer of sorts, responsible for the deaths of three of our classmates.

But even if you never speak to me again, you still have the option of admitting what happened. Not to your parents and the world at large, but TO YOURSELF! I’m not saying it’s all your fault-you didn’t tell them to speed or to let Kenny drive-just that you can’t ignore the part you played in it. I know I’m asking you to do something hard, but I also believe it will liberate you in a way you never imagined. Stand up, Kat. For once do something that doesn’t come easy. Earn your place in heaven. Earn all that love the world heaps on you.

Eve sat at the end of her family’s driveway-the real one, off Old Town Road, not the fake one her father had cut into Sweet-water Estates-keeping company with two bushels of tomatoes, several ears of white corn, and endless zucchini. But it was a slow afternoon, with few people stopping to buy. She had only sixteen dollars to show for her two hours out here, and she was expected to split that with her father.

Bored, she had taken the creased letter from the back pocket of her cutoffs, a letter she had read many times over the past two months. It changed, according to Eve’s mood, just as some movies changed when you watched them over and over again. But it never failed to fascinate her, this glimpse into another girl’s life on the day before she died. So that’s what they had been doing in the woods, all those years ago. Of course Eve knew the story about what had happened in the bathroom-Binnie had finally confessed all when she came to get the cell phones she had asked Eve to stash someplace safe. But the shooting was far less interesting to Eve than the emotion in the letter, as close to a love letter as anything she had ever read.

From time to time, Eve thought about destroying the letter or telling someone she had it. But, as with most of her secrets, Eve didn’t think it was information that anyone wanted.

She admired her sandals, the green-and-yellow ones that Binnie had brought her a few days after the shooting and asked her to hide. They were really too nice to be wearing out here, at the end of the dusty driveway, but she loved them so much that she put them on at every opportunity. That’s why she couldn’t bear to put them in the compost pile with the cell phones, which Binnie had given her in those first frantic moments, when she found Eve waiting in the trees for Val and Lila. It seemed such a waste and the fact that they fit-well, that was a sign, wasn’t it? It had never occurred to her that Josie might want them back. Eve wouldn’t, in Josie’s place.

A Volvo station wagon stopped, and Eve put on her friendly, helpful face, but it was Val and Lila, who were not likely to be in the market for vegetables. She faced them defiantly, not sure how they would react to seeing her behind the stand.

“You sell, like, vegetables?” Lila asked.

“My dad splits the take with me fifty-fifty,” Eve said. “It’s good money on weekends.”

“Cool,” Val said. “Want to go to the pool?”

“I’m not a member,” Eve said.

“We can take you as a guest,” Lila said.

“I have to ask my parents.”

“You ask now?” But Val grinned, so Eve knew she was being teased.

“Yeah.” Peter Lasko’s death had shaken Eve’s parents hard-not because he was killed by the Muhlys’ neighbor and friend but because it quickly came to light that Peter had brought Eve home just a few minutes before he was shot. They had promised Eve they would be more lenient if she would be more honest with them. So far they were keeping their side of the bargain.

Val and Lila helped her load the produce, the sign, and the table into Val’s Volvo, then drove her up the long, dusty driveway to the barn, where she stored the items in a freestanding shed and received her father’s permission to take the rest of the afternoon off.

“It’s so slow,” Eve said. “I don’t think you’ll lose a single sale.”

“It must be slow,” he said, looking at the five dollars in the cigar box Eve handed him.

“Weekdays,” Eve said with a shrug.

Lenhardt ended upspending the rest of the day babysitting a jury in Towson, curious to see if he was going to get the first-degree conviction he deserved on the last of the suspects in the Woodlawn case. The jury was trying to claim it was deadlocked, which was a bad sign, but the judge decided to press them, make them spend the night in a motel and return for another day of deliberations. It would be a bitch trying this guy all over again.

Marcia was in the side vegetable garden clipping basil. Lenhardt happened to hate basil, but he wouldn’t mention that, not tonight. He and Marcia were in a good place lately, one of those serene lulls that long-married couples learn not to take for granted.

He watched his wife bending over, scissors in hand. The black-and-white checked pants did her ass no favors, but the extra pounds she carried suited the rest of her, especially her face. With her full cheeks and blond ponytail, Marcia looked as young as she had when he married her, and no one would say the same of Lenhardt. He should take pains not to fall asleep in front of the television tonight and not to let her have the extra glass of wine that caused her to nod off over whatever she was reading for her book club.

In the house, shut up from the beautiful summer day in the bubble of central air-conditioning, Jason was at the computer in the family room.

“Mom fed us burgers already,” Jason said, “but she’s making a second dinner for the two of you. Something more grown-up, she said.”

“That’s nice.” So he and Marcia were on the same wavelength, other than the basil.

“What are you reading on the Internet, Jase?”

“Porn.”

“That’s my boy. No, seriously, Jase.”

“ Seriously, I’m downloading a few songs. Legally .”

“I appreciate that. Would be kind of embarrassing for me, having the feds raid the house because my son was a music pirate.”

“Aaaaaaargh,” Jason said in his old-salt croak, a voice picked up from some cartoon. “I sail the seas of the Internet, looking for musical booty to plunder.”

“Where’s your sister?”

“In her room.”

“Doing what?”

“Who cares?”

“Jason.”

Jessica was lying on her bed, plugged in to her digital mini-not an iPod but a lesser MP3 player, a faux pas for which her parents had not quite been forgiven even now, eight months after Christmas.

“Dad.” She gave the word almost eight syllables. “You’re supposed to knock.”

“I did, but you didn’t hear me. What are you doing?”

“Listening to music.” Melodramatic eye roll and a huge, heaving sigh, but for whose benefit? He already knew that his daughter thought he was an idiot, and no one else was in the room.